J: GALLERY is pleased to present “Hot”, the first episode of the serial exhibition “Total War or Nothing at All”, curated by Chen Chenchen, young artist, curator and musician. This exhibition is initially inspired by Li Zhenhua, participating artists include Li Zhenhua, He Xiangyu, Chen Chenchen, Li Weiyi, Song Xi, Lu Zhengyuan, Ye Nan, Zhang Quan, and the exhibition set is designed by artist Ding Nan. The opening of this exhibition will take place on 20 August 2016, and will last until 23 October 2016.

This serial exhibition, “Total War Or Nothing At All”, will construct and intensify what may be generally recognised as extreme environments, the artists respond to such “extremes” through their artworks. “Negative environments”, even if an intolerable hot space, can be compensated, or “tamed”, through artistic imagination. In this exhibition, the artists seek ways to coexist with such extreme hot environment through the lens of their unique art creation, using multi-media representations, and to refresh our predominant understanding of “hot” through various dimensions. In the space of “Total War or Nothing at All”, artworks take up the role of a catalyst: to accelerate a series of chemical reactions between three parties: the gallery space as an extreme environment, artworks, and the audience. It is the presence of these artworks that modifies and justifies the place they are in, which then becomes transcended into a space that is sought after, just because it offers stimulating multi- sensory experience that is exclusive to this particular space and setting.

Concerning “Total war or Nothing at all” Statement by Chen Chenchen

In order to produce a work that embodies vital creation, some stimulus need to be introduced in – in this case, we choose to take up some extreme methods of thinking. We create a space that is packed with “messages” – by which we refer to anything that might arouse intellectual and sensory reactions. This space, with the absence of artworks, is therefore filled with negative messages, overloaded by minuses. However, this situation is intentionally devised in order for the artists to transcend it into a space beyond expectation, ideally a pleasure-inspiring one, through their artistic creation. For artists, there seems no such “negative environment” – constrains are manipulable kite-strings.

In order to legitimise the above mentioned minuses to make sense, we are to produce some sorts of extreme environments that human beings physically dislike – a place that is biologically unbearable or even pushing people to flee, a kind of space that is atmospherically richer, relationally more intertwined, molecularly more reactive, spatially more inspiring and vibrant. We normally have a presumption of the amount of messages we gain per unit of time. In a situation where the messages we received become overloaded, negative responses will be generated, such as anxiety, fidget and pain. Such negative reactions are exactly demonstrations of the sufficiency of messages that this space encompasses. What we need is to devise a kind of interpretative agency that grants us the ability to transform minuses to pluses, to transcend extreme environments into a pleasure-inspiring medium.

Take Masochist for example, biological reactions occurred during the process of being abused are transparent: it is opened to share with anyone through practicing on them the same method. However, our judgements could vary due to diverse interpretation of this Masochistic experience. An environment that appears catastrophic for some people, might simultaneously be a medication for some others – such value judgments are personal, derived exclusively from our own interpretation. In reimaging the vision of purgatory, envisaging ascetic practices and tortures, a perceptional Nirvana begins to take shape.

Artists’ creative works offer trial-and-error attempts to prepare the audience for entering this sort of “extreme environment” and to coexist with it. Such artistic creation would thus generate a force to tame a “barricading-Sphinx” and to domesticate a “savage-Cyclops”, transforming a seemingly terrible situation to a sought after “theatre stage”. These artworks represent not only the artist’s ambition to justify extreme environments, but also a transcendence of the Freudian Pleasure Principle – the instinctual seeking of pleasure and avoiding of pain in order to satisfy biological and psychological needs. It is a trust of our imagination and a thoroughly opened stance towards the world we are in. Through artistic creation, the artists in fact not only have undergone an internal meditation, but also offer an exemplary solution to the negative side of the external world. Creative force is used as a weapon against the negative environment, to break through the barricades and to open up diverse paths of understanding and interpretation. In this exhibition, art works serve as a facility that converses negative energies to positive, an agency that offers an “upgrading patch” for our ordinary interpretation of extreme situations, a compensation without affection. Their presence transcends the extreme environment in the gallery space, so that we find such environment is co-existable, feasible, and even desired.

He Xiangyu was born in Kuandian Manchu Autonomous County, Liaoning in 1986. He graduated from Shenyang Normal University with a degree in Oil Painting in 2008, and is now based in Beijing and Berlin. He Xiangyu’s art practice can be seen as a material test site and conceptual laboratory for a variety of individual, social and political themes. As an artist growing up during the period of rapid urbanization in China, He Xiangyu attempts to give expression to or guide sensory perception via the transformation between objects. Through an underlying transition of materials, his work “Cola Project” (2009-2012) embodies the concept of manufacturing and consumption. Exploring Cola itself as a drinkable fluid, the work departs from the exciting sensation of fizzy bubbles filling the drinker’s mouth and renders this into a solid state. The artist then transferred and extended the concepts of material and time, resulting in the work “Tank Project” (2011-2013). “Tank Project” similarly relies on the coordination of long lasting manual labor. The latter serves a guiding principle in the artist’s practice.

In his other artworks, He Xiangyu prefers to take the experience of the individual as his point of departure. “Palate Project – Everything We Create is Not Ourselves ” (2012-present) uses various visual forms to express the process of ascertaining tactile impressions. A total of 20 series of painting works on paper and 1 series of bronze sculptures stem from 3 years of research and artistic practice. The artist reproduces the feeling of the tongue tracking the internal outlines of the oral cavity, which then evolves into involvement throughout the artistic practice, providing yet another discipline from which to enter into sensory perception. The video installation work “Turtle, Lion, Bear” (2015), which was exhibited during the Lyon Biennale, similarly draws people into a space of physiological perception, in an attempt to point out the common fundaments of the concept of looking at each other face to face and the ability to undergo sensory experiences, and explore the possibilities behind the peeling off of characteristics of civilization and discernable identity.

CHEN CHENCHEN

Chen Chenchen was born in Hangzhou in 1987, after graduated from China Academy of Art with a B.A. degree in Mixed-Media Art in 2010, he then continued his study at the Studio of Total Art, School of Inter-Media Art (SIMA) in Hangzhou and received an M.A. there. He became a phD candidate in the department of Philosophy, Capital Normal University in 2014.

Chen Chenchen’s accomplishment in the art field centres upon construction of conceptions, his works cover a wide range of representations: video, theatre, painting, installation, live performance and music. Albeit each individual project has its own unique theme and is carried out by certain means of representation distinguished from one another, these artworks interact and constitute a series of parallel worlds. Simultaneously, however, they are coherently arranged into a futuristic panorama within Chen Chenchen’s conceptual framework of “Poor Sci-Fi”. That is, a Science Fiction rooted and sprouted from our tough situation – a Sci-Fi that does not derived from anything comforting or glamorous, but from the “poor” side of a complex entity which makes up our real life. It is a life experiment generated from our primitive desire and fear, of which the target, however, looks upon to humanistic future.

LI WEIYI

Li Weiyi was born in Changsha in 1987. She graduated from Tongji University with a B.F.A. in Visual Communication Design in 2009, and graduated from Yale University with an M.F.A. degree in Graphic Design in 2012. She is currently studying PHD in Innovation Design Engineering in Royal College of Art, London. Li Weiyi is an artist weiyi.li, designer weiyiandfriends.com, curator bigbadgallery.com, publisher re-publication.com and retailor currently-available.com who lives and works between these five URLs.

SONG XI

Song Xi was born in 1983 with Daur nationality, Heilongjiang Province, China. He graduated from Art and Design College in University of Light Industry, Dalian in 2006, and currently lives and works in Beijing. Song Xi’s artistic creation focuses on the body as an expressive medium. Inside of a socialised body, highly developed ideologies conceal their multiple identities – which also bear certain political message. The physicality of flesh and sensory reaction of the body itself generate corporeal warmth and intellectual reflections, which are represented in unsettled forms of art. Such warmth and reflections become disguised in visually minimal forms, thus establishing some kind of unspeakable relations that embody interwoven multi-identities. Alienated perception and experience that deviate a routine order, could often lead to “false” judgement, consequentially imposing a conscious “abuse” upon corporeal sensation. Apart from exploring the ways how body could deliver emotion and sensation, Song Xi also works on research projects that study the interrelation between body, society and politics, inaugurating.

LU ZHENYUAN

Lu Zhenyuan was born in Dalian in 1982, graduated from and now teaches at Central Academy of Fine Arts. He is now based in Beijing. Lu Zhenyuan counters formalised styles and methods, his works touch upon multiple forms of art, including sculpture, painting, installation and video. Lu Zhenyuan looks at artistic transition of corporeal perception, day-to-day life reality, and those that are on the fringe or that can not be clearly categorised. He is seeking ways to represent daily experience and unspeakable cognition. Lu Zhenyuan’s works have been shown at many important exhibitions at home at abroad, such as the Shanghai Biennale, Shenzhen International Sculpture Biennale, Ullens Centre for Contemporary Art, China Art Museum, Museum of China Central Academy of Fine Arts, Shanghai Long Museum, Today Art Museum, Beijing Times Art Museum, Australia White Rabbit Gallery, Lisbon Museu Fundação Oriente, Chile Cultural Centre of Providencia, Germany Bonn Contemporary Art Centre. He also had solo exhibitions at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Taipei (MoCa), Beijing Ullens Centre for Contemporary Art (UCCA), Beijing White Box Museum of Art, Taikang Space, Hive Centre for Contemporary Art, Phoenix Art Centre, NY Eli Klein Fine Art, Italy Marella Gallery, Taiwan Eslite Gallery, etc.

YE NAN

Ye Nan was born in Hangzhou in 1984, graduated from and now working at Central Academy of Fine Arts. He is now based in Beijing and Hangzhou. Born in 1984, this year coincides with the title of George Orwell’s renowned novel, which is also a sum of the issues Ye Nan has long been questioning and concerning with. Ye Nan thus named his long-term art project “Project 1984”, in which his interests and working methods accumulate and become integrated. In Ye Nan’s open comic project “I Deleted All My Photos” (2015), the artist integrated historical events and his own personal experience since his birth in 1984 to invent and to fabricate narratives and discourses in diverse forms of representations. Ye Nan is now working on a research project on monuments.

ZHANG QUAN

Zhang Quan was born in Nanjing, Jiangsu in 1989. He currently lives and works in Nanjing. Zhan Quan’s works often employ most conventional sculptural language to depict the popular cult developed by various Western social icons and symbols. Zhang Quan work devotes to create “the art that everyone could understand”. His “Fei Chang Project” encouraged local residents to participate, by exhibiting this project he realised his ambition to “cook Fei Chang (pork intestine) noodles in art gallery”. His works have been exhibited in Shanghai, Taipei, London and other cities.

About J: GALLERY

Founded in Shanghai, J: GALLERY takes Chinese emerging artists as the principle line, further look widely at Asia even the scope of globe, constantly presents experimental exhibition and projects with prospective view. We are trying to break through the method and thinking of curating, meanwhile aiming to dig out avant-garde potential young artists driving by creative power and gather them together. Jumping out from the limitation of formalization, encourage the blending of divers medias and presenting ways. Moreover, motivate the crossover between art and other areas such as architecture, film, music, publication and performing, to explore more possibilities of contemporary art in the current society, also the brightness and heat it can emit in the wave of present age.